ESF Divination providing Scry has long been a subject of debate; but personally I feel that it's too binary. Most of the time you scry, nothing interesting happens; but sometimes you get that really juicy bit of intelligence that can upturn someone's RP. Especially if they don't know how to ward against it. So I suggest a change to make it more fun for diviners, add more counterplay and make it more fun for the scried victim.
SF Divination:
- Still provide access to attunements and aspects.
- Provide access to the Deck of Stars.
- Notifies if Locate Creature is ever used on the character.
GSF Divination:
- Provide access to "Locate Creature".
> This would allow someone once per 20 RL minutes to find the location of a character, as a simple line of text. This is blocked by ESF Abjuration Wards. Concealment (from any source, including ghostly visage, displacement, blur, ethreal visage, and improved invisibility, as well as class abilities that give concealment like shadowdancer shadow evade etc) disrupts the ability but doesn't block it, rather than stating the location of the person it states their location randomized within 1 transitions. For example, if Locate Creature says "Cordor Outskirts" that means they could be in the Outskirts, a house in the Outskirts, the Nomad, the Government District, or on the surface server.
>> Epic Illusionists, illusion specialists, and perhaps shadowdancers, would increase the randomization effect to 2-3 transitions (while concealed).
>> Epic diviners and diviner specialists reduce the randomization to a minimum of 1.
>> Anyone with SF Divination (including from items like Eye of Savras) can sense this Locate Creature.
>>> Alternatively, if randomizing based off nearby transitions is too technically difficult, it could randomize within 1-3 of the last places the character has been. So if they're walking from the Nomad to their home in the cultural district, it might say the Nomad, the outskirts, the Government district or the cultural district. If they teleport, it'd be even harder to tell.
ESF Divination:
- Provides access to "Create Token".
> Create Token makes a little gemlike object that can be renamed and can go into a gem pouch. Each Token is tied to it's creator.
> The creator of a Token can "Locate Creature" on the holder of the token, without any randomization and through concealment and ESF Wards. The holder is still notified.
- Provides access to "Scry Token"
> Allows the creator of a Token to 'scry' the holder of a Token. Giving them 2 minutes to hear everything around the character. This does not teleport the scrier into the room, but only sends a copy of all messages to the combat log.
>> Listen or Spellcraft checks can be made to break disguises, against their perform/bluff, without them benefitting from Cover.
>> Illusion specialists and ESF illusionists get a bonus to keeping their disguise.
>> Divination specialists get a bonus to breaking disguises.
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The above would primarily help make scrying more interesting. You're not locked into an animation as a diviner for 1-4 minutes staring at someone sitting around. You have to actually put effort into scrying the person, while also allowing people to willingly accept being scried. For example a police state could enforce all their guards having one! This would open up RP opportunities for if you have stealthers sneaking into places, and your diviners are on hand to watch them. Or give the tokens to important people incase they are captured, so you can find them. Or just give one to your friends that you watch over, in case anything ever happens to them.
Locating a character is one of the main uses of scrying, but it always sucks that you lose all your buffs to do so. Making it easy to be aware of the locating makes it easy to get out of there if you're worried about scry-ganks, but also means loremasters aren't getting it and it's a real investment. It means diviners can find their friends for RP much more easily, but they will also be aware of it won't be as blah as if their pal peeped on them.
Moving deck of stars to SF just means there is more opportunities for it to be roleplayed, as I find that there aren't enough true diviners to really make use of it and make much RP from it - and it's a very cool system.
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As a bonus to the create tokens, it'd be great if at some point it was possible to reverse pickpocket. Would be a great way to plant a token, which still has the counterplay of being able to find it in your inventory and dispose of it.